


A Mouse Gnawing In Her Chest

by Thia (Jennaria)



Category: Blue Castle - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/F, F/M, Missus Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennaria/pseuds/Thia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a shameful, private little corner of her heart, Cecily raised up an altar to unbeautiful, skittish, kind Valancy Stirling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mouse Gnawing In Her Chest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lothkitten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lothkitten/gifts).



> The title is from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing symptoms of tuberculosis. Beta-thanks go to Kay and Stef, for looking this over and suggesting tweaks as necessary. And Yuletide thanks go to ainosenshi for asking for this pairing, which I'd never even thought of!

Valancy Stirling was not beautiful. Not even the way Cissy was, in a little shameful corner of her mind, aware that she had once been beautiful, with the prettiness of youth and innocence. Valancy was thin to the point of being scrawny, with nothing round and comfortable about her; her oddly slanted eyes watched everyone around her with a pinched, worried look, like a cat that wants a hand to pet it but knows it's more likely to get thrown across the room; and she wore her old-maid-ish clothes with an awkward air, as if they had never quite become comfortable no matter how long she wore them.

On Cissy's first day at grammar school, she became quite lost in the long halls to class. After the third wrong turn in a row, she stopped looking for the right door, and stood in the middle of the hall, biting her lip so she wouldn't cry, and trying to remember where she was _supposed_ to be. Then a narrow hand slipped into hers, and Valancy Stirling smiled down at her. "You're in Mrs. Jenkins' class, aren't you? Here, I'll take you."

It was a simple little thing, the sort of almost absent kindness that anyone might have shown. But it had been Valancy who had shown it. Valancy was four years older, so Cissy had no classes with the other girl, and hardly more opportunity to even see her in passing. But she never forgot, and in an equally shameful private little corner of her heart, she raised up an altar to unbeautiful, skittish, kind Valancy Stirling.

*

"Oh! Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize anyone else was here!"

Cissy was already turning to go when she felt a hand on her arm. The boy she'd interrupted was smiling down at her, his sketch-pad abandoned on the ground behind him. "It's all right," he said. "I don't mind being interrupted."

Cissy looked up, meaning to apologize again, and was caught in oddly slanted dark eyes. For a startled moment Cissy was reminded of a girl she hadn't seen in years. Then the boy continued, in a nice smooth voice that sounded nothing like Valancy Stirling, and the momentary illusion was broken. "I wasn't actually getting anything drawn, I confess. I was sitting here and dreaming."

"It - it _is_ a beautiful place," Cissy said timidly, allowing herself to be turned back around. She hadn't let herself look at the boy properly before: he wasn't really a boy, but a man of at least her own age, dressed in a somewhat crumpled suit of blue linen, with graphite smudges on his fingers and a soft wistfulness to his smile that irresistably reminded her again of Valancy.

"Yes, it is," the man said. He wasn't looking up at the trees or flowers at all.

Cissy looked away, blushing, and heard the man laugh quietly. "My name is John Cavendish. May I ask for yours?"

She shouldn't tell him. She was only a waitress at the hotel, not a guest herself. But Cissy looked back at the soft smile and the slanted beautiful eyes, and said, "Cecily Gay."

*

At first Cissy tried to sweep out the front room, but even the little dust she could manage to raise set her to coughing. When she sat down, though, she caught herself thinking, _no, I must get this all in order, it will be Jack's birthday tomorrow and I don't want --_ and she found herself crying again.

She had cried herself dry again, and was trying to find the strength to rise up and go wash her face, when she heard a clattering out on the road that she vaguely recognized. It was a car approaching, wasn't it? The car belonging to her father's friend, Mr. Snaith.

Cissy hastily wiped her face with her sleeve, as if she were a child (no, don't think about that). The car had stopped outside. She had better go and tell Mr. Snaith that her father wasn't here.

Mr. Snaith was waiting by the gate, looking off into the woods and whistling something pretty that Cissy didn't recognize. He broke off as soon as he realized she was there, and nodded to her politely. "Miss Gay."

"Mr. Snaith," Cissy said, equally formally. She shivered: it was a little cold in the spring twilight, and she'd forgotten a shawl in her hurry to get outside. "I'm sorry, but my father –"

"I didn't come for Abel," Mr. Snaith said. "I came to drop off something for you."

"For me? But –"

"Although you can share them with him if you'd like," he said, as if he hadn't even heard her inarticulate attempt at protest, and held out a small cloth bag.

Cissy took it, rather than protest more, and opened it. It contained oranges. The tangy, tantalizing smell of them wafted up from the bag, and she took her first deep breath in ages to draw it in. She hadn't had oranges since she was in school.

"Thank you, Mr. Snaith," she said, opening her eyes again.

He was looking at her quizzically, eyebrows askew. Finally he smiled, that tilted smile she vaguely remembered him always having. "Call me Barney." With a gesture as if tipping an invisible hat, he hopped back into his car and racketed back off down the road.

Cissy didn't watch him go. She walked slowly back inside, both to keep herself from coughing and so she wouldn't spill any of the precious oranges out of the bag. They might not be as _traditional_ as the casseroles and cakes that those horrible women had brought when Jack – when they'd learned about what happened to her little Jack, but they would taste so much the sweeter for not having been choked down between avoiding awful questions.

*

 _You have two months to live_ , the doctor had said.

No. He'd actually said a great deal more, most of it in confusing jargon that Cissy didn't understand in the slightest. Finally he'd run dry, or he'd seen the blank look on Cissy's face at last. He sat down in front of her, folded his hands, and said, "You have tuberculosis, Miss Gay. Quite an advanced case, as a matter of fact."

"So I am dying," Cissy had said, half to herself, and the doctor said gravely, "I advise you to put your affairs in order, yes."

Father didn't ask her what the doctor said. In the numb state that seemed to have been hers for months now, Cissy did not find this curious. They returned home, and Cissy sat down in front of the fire, and picked up the mending she'd been trying to work on.

 _Not much longer_ , she thought dully, and realized she was crying again - whether from sorrow or from an odd sort of relief, even she wasn't certain.

She didn't see her father come into the room. She only realized he was there when she felt the rough handkerchief scrubbing at her cheeks. She blinked, and looked up at him, still watery-eyed. "You don't - you don't -" _You don't have to do this,_ she meant, or perhaps _you don't have the disease yet, you should go away and leave me and be safe_.

"Least I can do for my little girl," Father said gruffly. There was a thickness to his voice that had nothing to do with alcohol.

*

Father brought it up at supper, a month or two after Valancy had come. "You come with me to the dance," he said to Valancy. "It'll do you some good - put some color in your cheeks." He glanced over at Cissy as well as he spoke, as if to give her the same command. He'd done it years ago, Before. But then he firmly looked back at Valancy, and added quickly, "You look peaked. You want something to liven you up."

Valancy flushed a little, and spooned up more of the rich chicken stew she'd made for dinner.. She didn't look at Cissy either, a little too obviously - the tablecloth was surely in need of patching and ironing, but it didn't deserve the strict attention she was giving it.

Father looked over at Cissy then, and tilted his head thoughtfully. For a mercy, he was hardly drunk at all, and he didn't say anything further.

Cissy ate her bowl of stew, and fought her little demons of jealousy. She didn't envy Valancy the invitation. Cissy had been to dances up back Before, even if not at Chidley Corners in particular, and they'd been pleasant but nothing she missed. But she was selfishly unwilling to let Valancy leave her, even just for the evening.

She'd been alone for so long, with only her father or those sneering, dirty women who came to keep house for them, and Barney's occasional visits. What if Valancy met some of the Sterlings on the road? Cissy knew that Valancy's people didn't approve of her coming here: a few of them had even dared the house and spoken to Valancy, walking right past Cissy as if she were already a ghost. Valancy could change her mind again, and vanish as if she'd never been here.

When they returned to Cissy's room, though, Cissy saw Valancy's wistful glance at the closet where she'd hung her dresses, and a burning, self-directed fury lit in her chest. "You should go," Cissy said.

Valancy jumped, and looked down at her. "I don't want to leave you alone," she said doubtfully.

"I'll be fine for an evening," Cissy said, ignoring the renewed demons that were whispering in her ear, _what if you're wrong?_. "You've hardly left me for the entire time you've been here." They'd gone for long walks, where Cissy hadn't had to say a thing, only listen as Valancy pointed out flowers or trees or repeated long passages of her favorite author about the very forests they were looking at; they'd sat inside in peaceful silence while Valancy made tea; they'd talked of little things. It had been heaven, but (to Cissy's shame) a selfish sort of heaven. Valancy even slept in her room, that Cissy might not wake and need something. "You _should_ go. You deserve the chance to enjoy yourself."

Valancy hesitated, and looked at the closet again. "If you're sure..." She drifted a step or two toward the closet, as gracefully as if she were already dancing.

"Of course," Cissy said. "Go change, dearest." And at least for the moment, she made herself mean it.

It wasn't until later, after Valancy was already dressed in green taffeta and red clover, that Cissy remembered that Valancy hadn't grown up with Abel Gay, and might not know how to handle a drunk who hadn't learned to control himself. But then, there might not be drink, and if Cissy said anything now it would be giving in to her own demons.

Valancy returned home early, in Barney Snaith's car, with light in her eyes that Cissy had never seen, and could only have put there herself in the most secret hidden wishes of her heart. Cissy didn't ask. But the oranges Barney always brought no longer tasted as sweet as they did once.

*

"Dreams are dangerous things," Valancy said.

Cissy turned her head to show she was listening. Her breath was coming far too short to speak properly, but when Valancy spoke in that wistful voice, she wanted nothing more than to listen.

"It's one of those contradictory things, I suppose. There's ordinary sorts of dreams that everyone's expected to have...or nearly everyone."

"Like children," Cissy whispered.

She expected her sweet, prudish Valancy to blush dark the way she usually did when either of them referred, even accidentally, to Cissy's 'disgrace.' Valancy did blush, but she leaned forward and said fiercely, " _Not_ just children, or having a husband, or anything like that. Like - like traveling, to Egypt or Italy or England. Or reading books. Or of never getting sick. Or simply breaking _free_."

"...Valancy?"

"I should have come sooner," Valancy said, and Cissy felt her slim hand wrap around Cissy's own.

"But it _is_ dangerous," Cissy said, carefully spacing her words with the shallow breaths she could manage. Valancy's hand in hers felt warm, so warm. "Your being here. More dangerous than dreaming."

Valancy squeezed Cissy's hand more tightly. "It doesn't matter," she said in a fierce voice, as if challenging someone or something. "Didn't _you_ ever want something more?"

Cissy closed her eyes, and remembered the prim little girl who had smiled kindly at her, and the boy with eyes like that girl who had loved her for a summer, and the woman grown who had come back to her with stars in her eyes for someone else. "It doesn't matter," she repeated. But there was no breath behind the words, and she wasn't sure if Valancy even heard.

-end-


End file.
